Attempts have been made to explain coups d'etat by reference to macro social and economic variables, structural features of the military in general, and, more commonly, of military elites, or by reference to the individual psychological qualities of the coup participants. Such theories are often held to be mutually exclusive and competing. This paper examines these theories and then tests them against data for 35 independent countries in sub-Sahara Africa, a region for which it has been widely argued that only "micro" explanations of coup activity scale which provides an interval measure of the dependent variable. Colonial background, contagion, and temporal hypotheses do not explain differences in coup activity. The data are then subjected to multiple-regression analysis using sets of socioeconomic and military variables. Although no single independent variable is conspicuously related to coups, multivariate analysis does explain some variance in coup activity. An explanation of coup activity that integrates the three levels usually employed by social scientists is suggested. This takes into account societal conditions conducive to coups, the relative dominance of military institutions, and, for residual variance, the personal characteristic of military officers and external influence on them.
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Alan Wells (1974) studied this question.